Chapter 1: Dress
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A/N: Hello everybody! It's been a while, but welcome back to the TCR birthday bash! This year, TCR turns 20 so I wanted do something a little bit different. So instead of individual one-shots, I've decided to link all the week's prompts into a single plotline, with one chapter each day linking (loosely, in some cases) to the daily prompt.
The concept here was inspired by Roderick Townley's The Great Good Thing, and then further prompted by the very exciting news that Whisper of the Heart is getting a live action/sequel adaptation later this year!
Enjoy!
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Haru Yoshioka had been 16 for a very long time and, had she been written later, she would have made a Twilight reference out of it.
She wasn't entirely sure how long, for in the pages of her book the only calendars that existed catered to the timeline of her narrative, marking it constantly the 26th or 27th May (and occasionally some time later in June, thanks to a 'one month later' epilogue) but it had certainly been a matter of years since they'd last been read.
And life had… well, it had mellowed since they had originally been published, even in a tale filled with talking cats and magic and living figurines. After all, their purpose was their story, and if they weren't being read… well…
So Haru Yoshioka, schoolgirl and resident protagonist, was bored.
Even – or especially – the antagonists felt it, and the Cat King would regularly lament with, "Do you remember when we had Readers?"
And Natori, his advisor, would dutifully agree with a, "Yes, sire."
"Once a week, we'd be read – out loud, no less!"
"Yes, sire."
"To a whole room of adoring listeners! Remember the prestige! The drama! The glory!"
'The disorientation,' Natori mentally added. Having a single Reader was (relatively) simple; you simply catered to the imagination of one mind, but to a dozen… you always felt like you were moving through a kaleidoscope, your appearance, clothing, and even your voice varying to fit the precise image each Reader held of you. Not to mention the slight echo of your voice as your dialogue was mirrored by the external narrator.
So the day-to-day living in The Cat Returns was not filled with daring rescues and feline kidnapping and all the things the author had originally planned, but instead was occupied by the mundane. The Cat King had taken up water painting, and Toto and Natori would meet up for a weekly comparison of their respective king/leader/babysitting duties, and Haru would spend lazy ever-sunlit afternoons in the fields of the Cat Kingdom.
Sleep was just beginning to steal over her during such a stint when the ground rumbled and a fan of light – bright and natural; not the artificial gleam of the books back-up lights – began opening in a corner of the sky.
"Reader!" gasped a nearby cat.
"Book opening!" cried another. "Book opening!"
Haru sprang to her feet. The Cat Kingdom was on page 98, and she was supposed to be on page 3. She made a run for it, dashing between paragraphs, even as the shadow of their Reader loomed overhead. She could hear Baron's opening monologue starting, and knew she had precious seconds to get back. She took a shortcut, circumventing the Cat Bureau chapter entirely, and landed ungainly on page 3 just as the Reader finished on 2.
She dashed under the covers of her bed and hoped the sheets would cover the fact that she was very definitely not wearing pyjamas. Her alarm clock beeped insistently, and she slammed a hand down on it and rolled over.
"Aren't you up yet?" cried her mother, who sounded like she'd run some ways also to reach her opening lines.
"I'm up! I'm up!" The fact that she was dressing from her comfy end-of-book clothes into her school uniform was probably easily dismissed, right? She tied her hair up into its bun, made to run downstairs, but faltered a moment to double-check her appearance in her mirror. In her early years, she had done this action many times, but never with quite so much relief as today. She flicked a stray blade of grass out of her hair and hoped the Reader didn't notice. "Whatever."
"Really, dear," her mother recited when Haru came fumbling into the kitchen, "why do you bother setting an alarm clock?" A smattering of quilt squares were gathered up in a newspaper which had been dumped on the coffee table; evidence of Naoko's attempt to change the kitchen table to breakfast with all of five seconds' warning.
"Gotta go!"
"Too bad you don't have time to eat," her mother teased. "It's delicious!"
The book flipped shut and the story was thrown into darkness. After a moment, the back-up lights flickered into life, just in time for Haru to see her mother spit back out the mouthful of toast she'd previously taken.
"Evidently, I do have time," Haru said, and she flopped into the chair opposite her mother. "What are you eating?"
"The emergency toast," her mother said.
"The one we keep in the fridge?"
"I didn't have enough time to properly prepare anything." Her mother binned the rest of the breakfast. "Now you're here, do you want some actual food?"
By way of response, Haru groaned and sank deeper into the kitchen chair.
After so long without a Reader, and then to have been read for only a handful of pages… She wondered whether it was something they'd done. Perhaps if they'd been written with a more immediate start – she'd heard from the newer books which had joined her shelf that first-line hooks were all the rage now…
"Do you think we'll ever get Readers again?" Haru asked.
"We just did."
"No, I mean proper Readers."
"I'm sure we will, someday," replied her mother vaguely. Apparently reassured that their limelight was over, she went to collect up her quilt squares and carry on the project she'd been so rudely interrupted in. "Now, can you see where I left my thread?"
Haru was just rising to search through the debris on the coffee table when light spilled out across the story again – but this time on the other side of the book. Haru exchanged glances with her mother, and then broke into another sprint.
One of the pros of being the protagonist was that she got plenty of page-time.
One of the cons of being the protagonist was that she got plenty of page-time.
She bypassed the Cat Bureau section once more, skidded into the Cat Kingdom chapter, and had to clamber between the margins to get to page 130, where Natoru and Natori were desperately trying to prologue their scene.
"Muta's not that strange a name," she could hear Natoru offer. "I knew a cat called Mute once." There was a long, hopeful pause in which the Reader's attention did not divert. "And another called Mytho."
"Mytho isn't quite the same as Muta, however," Natori replied slowly.
Haru skidded to the dressing room and the three maids began throwing the gown over her almost before she had come to a halt. She felt the Reader's eyes turn to her, and, still fumbling with the shoulder pads of her dress, plunged into her lines.
"So-King-I'm-really-flattered-by-all-this-but-I-don't-want-to-get-married," she gasped.
The Cat King beamed at her, before remembering to school his expression into something of shock. "You what? I was told you'd already consented."
Finally released from the banality of small talk, Natori slipped into the room. The elderly advisor cat shot her a quick thumbs up for her eventual entrance, before returning to his scripted role. "She has consented; that's what I was told."
"What about the – heh – what about the prince?" Haru fought against the urge to laugh as a maid latching her fish necklace about her neck unintentionally tickled her. The gasp turned into a rasp as another maid tightened the corset. "What-does-he-say?" she rushed before either could break her character.
"He's not around," said Natori. "He is away on official business."
The sound Haru was meant to make at this point was a thoughtful sort of hum, whereas the actual noise she made was a wheeze. She leant against one of the mirrors. "Look, first of all, we don't really…" The mirror began to slide across the floor. "We don't really know each–" she made a grab for it and missed – "other!" she cried as the mirror toppled over with a tremendous crash, and somehow didn't shatter. "Oh no!"
The maids screamed, and one fainted clean away.
Somewhere, someone was laughing.
"And he's a cat," said the Cat King, who in the chaos had remembered it was someone's line, but not whose, "and you're not."
"Yes!" Haru cried. "So clearly I cannot marry him!"
"Yes!" agreed the King.
"But we have already taken care of that," interrupted Natori, before the Cat King could diverge any further from his appointed lines.
"We have!"
The laughter grew louder.
"And why is that?" Haru prompted.
"Because–" The Cat King glanced worriedly to the mirror and maid strewn across the floor. "Because you're not a cat – I mean, you are! You're a half cat already!"
The maid who was just coming to gave the nearby mirror a shove, and it skidded in Haru's direction, just enough to show her half-feline appearance.
This line, at least, Haru was sure of.
"CAAAAAAT!"
The laughter briefly rose, and then settled back. The Reader slowed and, from above, there came a murmur that Haru only just caught.
She glanced up, and saw the face of their Reader, a woman with reddish-brown hair. The Reader's eyes crinkled with humour and… something else, and then the book was gently closed once more.
"Page 130," the King muttered as the back-up lights returned. "Why can't these Readers be responsible and start at the beginning, like they're meant to?"
The maids collected up the mirror and their fallen brethren. Natori raised his gaze up and, readjusting his glasses, said, "Be prepared; the Reader might decide to jump to another chapter again."
But the Reader didn't and, after too many years of being abandoned on a shelf, The Cat Returns was once again Readerless. Melancholy settled over the characters, who had almost forgotten what it was truly like to play their parts before an audience.
Only Haru didn't feel it, for she was too preoccupied with the muttered words she'd heard from the Reader.
"I don't remember writing that."